Monday, May 22, 2017

I'm torn about this
month's editorial cue: we've been asked to think about what political movements
Millennials care about and what shape/s activism to come might take, buffeted
as this space (also) is by advances in technology and the fact of globalisation.
Are we more active in politics than our parents? I want, more than anything, to
be able to answer this question in the affirmative. Can I, in all
honesty? Nope.

Because generalisations
(such as the one I've just made) are anathema to me, I'm going to dial this
back somewhat, and focus on what I can speak about with some authority - my
location in the heart of a 'developing' post-colony, and what I see of
political engagement and activism in and amongst those of my peers I share this
space with. But that can only come after I've been able to frame this
discussion by locating its back-story. The Indian context is polyphonic in the
extreme; as I've said so many times before, it is impossible to speak about
India in the singular at all. We are a fractured and fractious polity,structurally premised on inequality (think of
the caste system) and its myriad manifestations.

The fact that the
freedom movement managed to - for brief periods of time between the 1920s and
1940s, mostly under the direction of an astute semiotician and all-round
splendid gent named Mohandas Gandhi - cobble together the semblance of a
'national' identity and front, and that this oozed into the early years of
independent India's very sense of self, is an undeniable truth. This movement was
all encompassing, with room in it for everyone from the ryot to the student;
the great-grand mother to the stripling 5-year-old who was schooled young into
the idiom that we leave no (wo)man behind. It must've been a heady time to be
alive, pregnant with possibility. Political engagement was not something
"out there", it was something you lived and breathed; its visual
markers and symbols were all-pervasive, from one's sartorial choices to one's
alimentary ones.

How, so, did we get from
there to here?

In the answer(s) to this
question lie stories of heartbreak. Mine, anyway.

The idealistic 'youth' of
the nationalist movement became the (slowly - the sheen took some time to wear off) disenchanted
parents and 'elders' of the next phase of India's story - decades rife with wars,
famines, sanctions (remember the permit raj?) and an increasing distance
between politicians and those they purported to represent. By the time the 80s
rolled around, and with them the birth of the demographic this entire series attempts
to make sense of, politics was already the immoral swamp it is today -
something people would attempt to insulate us from as opposed to encourage us
to engage with. The 90s brought India kicking and screaming into the global
marketplace with our euphemistically titled 'liberalisation' programme, which
effectively rendered the 'Socialist' descriptor in our Constitution a dead
letter. The state has taken so much of a back-seat that for most of us - those
of us privileged enough to not have to depend for subsistence on a leaky,
broken public distribution system, I mean - we can spend all our lives thinking
about the government merely when we're whining and moaning about the taxes we
pay (or, more accurately, design elaborate jugaadu schemes to not pay).

No, we're not political,
mainly because most of us are self-absorbed in the extreme, but how can we not
be when the mainstream narrative of 'success' we've imbibed from the time we're
in our (private) schools and universities and then go to work in (MNC)
corporations is so ridiculously monolithic? Capitalism has defanged not just
the state machinery charged with our welfare, it has defanged us, by selling us
the idea that we can - and should - be apolitical. News flash: there is no such
thing. Do you think I'm overstating this point? Think about it for one hot
minute: what was the last mass movement you remember having spurred massive youth
engagement here? 'India Against Corruption' (circa 2011-2012). What brought people
out into the streets then? What drove them to that dim-witted closet-fascist
Anna Hazare's arms? The fact that they once had to pay a bribe to a cop who
tried to make a fast buck? That they had to pay a petty officer to get him or
her to move their file along? We're only really inclined to be a part of
something that affects us personally.

I say this with feeling
because if it weren't true, man, a lot more of us would be protesting and
marching and rallying and organising against the disgusting spate of
cow-killings and vigilantism that has India in a vice-like (very saffron) choke-hold. I say this because very few of us give enough of a fuck to do
anything about the fact that marital rape isn't - even today - recognised as
rape at all; because Dalit atrocities are as high as they've ever been and all
we can talk about is how reservations are anti-'merit'. Study after study shows
that we 'the youth', also don't vote in large numbers, but are happy enough to
spend an afternoon (especially if it is a sunny one) marching to protest
results we're not tickled with. Sample this: "Immediately after the vote
on Brexit, thousands of young people marched in the streets of England to show
their disagreement over the choice to leave Europe. But polls indicated that
had they voted en masse (only 37% voted), the result of the referendum would
have been the opposite."[1]

So are we truly as
liberated or progressive as we believe we are? Are we hotter on posturing than
putting in the time and effort to make a difference, especially if it isn't our
own lives which stand to change or benefit from it? So, to end
in and with my beginning, to care or not to care? At the rate at which things
are spiraling out of control, I'm afraid this isn't going to be a question
with more than one answer for very much longer.

P.S. Just today I read about the glorious turnout at
the 'Bhim Army' rally in Jantar Mantar - 20,000 people, by some estimates. The Bhim Army was founded by an erudite and fiery young lawyer named
Chandrashekhar (or 'Raavan'), and Vinay Ratan Singh, and started by "running a
school for Dalit children, providing them with a sound education which the
government-run schools were failing to impart. In July 2015, the first school
was set up, and within two years, the number of schools run by the Bhim Army
has shot up to over 300, run by Dalits for fellow Dalits and other children
from underprivileged backgrounds."[2]
The rally in Delhi was to protest the sharp increase in Dalit atrocities in
Uttar Pradesh under the new Adityanath administration. Chandrashekhar seems to
recognise that in order for this to work, the movement needs to be
intersectional in the extreme - women, Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis - we must all
come together. The Bhim Army will undoubtedly come up against the apathy I
lament in the post above, but I'm holding my breath to see what will come of this. Is
this (tantalisingly titled) front the beginnings of the
resistance we've been waiting for? I don't know. But today, I chant full-throatedly, Jai Bhim!

[1]
See this incredibly detailed piece for more: https://thewire.in/136732/young-people-didnt-vote-now-protest/